Release Songs

Every 6 months the OpenBSD project has the pleasure to release
software on an official CDROM set, with artwork and a matching song.
Theo and some other developers mutate a theme (from a classical
setting, a movie, or some genre) into the fishy world of Puffy, to
describe some advance, event or controversy the project went through
over the previous six months. To match the art released with the CD,
we join up with some musicians we know to make a song. Theo then gets
the pleasure (and responsibility) to write a commentary explaining it all.

Both CDs contain extra tracks by the artist Ty Semaka
(who really has "had Puffy on his mind").
"The Songs 4.1 - 5.1" also contains another track by audio-subsystem
developer Alexandre Ratchov, mixed and produced using OpenBSD code.

No one wants to fork an open source project: it's a huge
amount of work and isn't efficient in community time, but when you
wake up one day and find that a hole in the SSL library you're using
made world-wide news, and that the library's bad code style is
hiding exploit mitigation countermeasures, then suddenly forking
seems critically important. Two months of intense development later,
LibreSSL was released.

The bigger questions remain for the open source development community
to answer: why did this occur? Why is the OpenSSL code base so hard
to understand? Complexity is the enemy of security, so for something
whose raison d'être is security, why are secondary goals allowed
to endanger the absolute #1 goal? Or has OpenSSL become a brand which
allows companies to — on the cheap — meet security
"requirements" like FIPS instead of actually being secure?

How important is it for developers and customers to have software
where security is the goal? How much are they willing to push back
on the OS developers and others to achieve that? Can we set a new,
higher bar for best practices that will drive everyone to do more
than just posture?

Composed by Richard Wagner in July of 1851. Arranged and performed
by Jonathan Lewis.

So talk to me, I'll be fine
But you better promise me I won't wrap back in time.
Don't wanna wrap back in time
Don't wanna wrap back in time
No bad hacks in time.

Don't wanna wrap back in time
Don't wanna wrap back in time
don't wrap! don't wrap!

In January of 2038, 32-bit Unix time will overflow and wrap
back to 1901. This is known as the
Year 2038 problem.
POSIX operating systems have made strong inroads into embedded
roles, so this is anticipated to be substantially worse than the Y2K transition.

In August of 2012, Philip Guenther started the OpenBSD work to
solve this.
After a year of work it was ready enough for merging, and in August 2013
the time_t type was changed to int64_t on all
platforms and the kernel and userland were adapted to the new
situation. The initial work was committed right after OpenBSD 5.4,
then polished in tree over the next 6 months.

The next part of the process was to drag the "ports" software
ecosystem along because no one else had paved the way for 32-bit
machines to run with 64-bit time_t. This required a fair
bit of upstream involvement. Thousands of fixes were required to
make both 32-bit and 64-bit time work transparently. There will
be more fixing in the future, but the concept is proven.

In the past OpenBSD pushed risky theoretical ideas into mainstream
software practice by proving the ecosystem was ready to change.
No OS wants to make a ABI jump until the case for change is proven.
Stack protection, ASLR, and W^X principles are now in common use
by mainline operating systems... because things like Firefox
and Postgresql don't break anymore. OpenBSD built that route.

In the same way, the road is paved for the 64-bit time_t
transition. Other operating systems can now make this jump.

Just as the original song professed its love for Brazil, "World,
you'll love my Linux" is the passionate call of an idealistic dreamer
who can't bear the thought of software that will only run under
Windows, and yet loves the situation with software that will only run
under particular Linux distributions.

This problem has proliferated itself into the standards bodies, with
Posix adopting Linuxisms ahead of any other variant of Unix.

Posix and Unix have made it where you can write reasonably portable
software and have it compile and run across a multitude of platforms.
Now this seems to be changing as the love for Linux drives the
standards bodies into accepting everything Linux, good and bad.

We also are faced with groups writing software that only works
with particular distributions of Linux. From this we get software that
not only isn't very portable, but often not particularly stable. Our
idealistic dreamer in the song loves running one, or more than one distribution
of Linux for a particular purpose. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left
with the unattractive choice of doing the same, or relying on
herculean efforts to port software that is being actively developed in a
way to discourage porting it to other platforms.

Linux, the one and only true Unix
We are in every way Posix
We voice our yearning "Someday soon"
We won't need any other.

Then, tomorrow brings a new distro
It's better than the last you know
Another million bits that changed
All the hacks and tweaks we conjure up
They just get pushed into Posix
There's one thing that I know
The world will love it, all Linux

Then, there's other stuff we push as well
Others can work around this hell
With just a million lines of Shell
Now, as standards ape the one Linux
Everyone else just gets stuffed
There's one thing that I'm certain of
The world will love it, all Linux
We are Posix
World, you'll love my Linux
Linux, Linux

Lyrics by Bob Beck. Music composed and arranged by Jonathan Lewis. Vocals
by Doug McKeag. Guitar by Victor Farrell. All other instruments,
Jonathan Lewis. Recorded, mixed, and mastered Jonathan Lewis of Moxam
Studios.

And you're off by one
And it ain't no fun
Who ya gonna install?
Bugbusters!

If your system's down
And it makes you frown
Who ya gonna install?
Bugbusters!

I ain't afraid of no holes
I ain't afraid of no holes

If you need a trace
Gonna win that race
Who ya gonna install?
Bugbusters!

If you got a crash
And you got no cash
Who ya gonna install?
Bugbusters!

OpenBSD makes me feel good!

Written and Arranged by Ty Semaka and Jonathan Lewis. Lyrics and Vocals
by Ty Semaka (www.tysemaka.com). All instruments programmed by
Jonathan Lewis. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jonathan Lewis of
Moxam Studios (moxam@hotmail.com).

"Shut up and Hack"

On a regular basis, the OpenBSD developers hold events called
hackathons. We've held many many
of them, all over the world. Sub-groups of developers sit
in one room and work fulltime for around a week.

One phrase in particular that has come up amongst developers,
to cut extra chit-chat to a minimum, is Shut up and Hack.
We've placed this phrase
on
hackathon tshirts too; they were very popular with the guys.

The 2nd OpenBSD Audio CD "The Songs 4.1 - 5.1" celebrates the
artwork and songs that have been released with each OpenBSD release.
All the songs from the 4.1 to 5.1 releases are included (plus
two bonus tracks).

The audio CD package contains some stickers (which ones may vary).

Shut up and hack!
In the hack room
In the back room
Wires everywhere

At the tables
Fingers able
Take another dare!

Close up your holes
Pick up the slack!
Get your head down!
Shut up and hack!
Close up your holes
Pick up the slack!
Get your head down!
Shut up and hack!

The OpenBSD 4.4 release artwork honoured
the (Berkeley) CSRG guys for their efforts with the BSD 4.4
release -- they fought and managed to free the code.

This release the artwork is based on the stories of Douglas Adams,
including his favorite number -- 42. Therefore we can remember
the previous major achievement of CSRG - BSD 4.2.

BSD 4.2 was
not free, but it created and integrated so many new
technologies that we all depend on today. Take a moment
to consider how many things first available in BSD 4.2 you are using
at this moment, to read this page -- sockets, AF_INET,
virtual memory, etc.

Today, new releases of operating systems from well-known vendors
contain less new features than BSD 4.2 did.

If only we could stop slacking and make a release like that!

How many streams must a fish swim down
before you can call him a man?
And how many codes must a vendor lock down
before silicon turns to sand?
Yes and how many times must the lawyers fly
before they are forever banned?

The answer my friend
BSD 4.2
The answer
BSD 4.2

How many years can a planet exist
before it is paved by the V?
How many years can some source code exist
before it's allowed to be free?
Yes and how many times can a fish turn his head
and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer my friend
BSD 4.2
The answer
BSD 4.2

How many times must we fight for the right
to share what is already ours?
Yes and how many times must we hitch while we hike
To end up not getting far?
And how many fish must we shove in our ear
before we can hear every star?

The answer my friend
BSD 4.2
The answer
BSD 4.2

And now we can travel the galaxy
with ships that are silicon made
And now with a towel and a laptop in hand
our future is made in the shade
And what did we use to build on and on
Inside everything that we use?

The answer my friend
BSD 4.2
The answer
BSD 4.2

Written and Arranged by Jonathan Lewis. Lyrics and Vocals by Ty Semaka
(www.tysemaka.com). Guitar and harmonica by Leslie Alexander
(www.lesliealexander.com). Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jonathan
Lewis of Moxam Studios (moxam@hotmail.com).

I love to hate my PC
But now it's not so easy
Just wanna get this job done
But these A.M.L. games are dumb

You wanna know the truth?
Intel's controlling you
And Microsoft is too
But this is nothing new

With A.C.P.I.
This endless mess so corporate
Tangles and angles
In what could be straight forward

Lost connections
Lost my mind
It's such a waste of time

CHORUS

Now on the motherboard
Where all my life is stored
Playing with garbage there
With rules so unfair

Ruled by A.C.P.I.
Whose heart is so corrupted
Forcing us all to play
Our progress interrupted

Lost connections
Lost my mind
It's such a waste of time

CHORUS

Yes I'm a user
And I'm not the only one
I'm not a loser
With help from Puffy Tron

And we will find it
The pin in all this heartache
Map our devices
And we know what it'll take

Lost connections
Lost my mind
Oh Ooh Woah end of line

(bridge)
On and on
Can we all be wrong?
All and all
We are one
Clean the dream
Gone wrong
We are Tron
On and on and on

Instrumental CHORUS (guitar solo)

Instrumental pre-chorus

CHORUS
dumb dumb dumb

Music written and arranged by Jonathan Lewis. Lyrics by Ty Semaka and
Theo de Raadt. Synth, drum and bass programming by Jonathan Lewis,
guitar by Russ Broom, vocals by Jonny Sinclair.
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jonathan Lewis of
Moxam Studios (moxamstudios@hotmail.com).

Nearly 10 years ago Kirk McKusick wrote a history of
the Berkeley Unix distributions for the
O'Reilly book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution".
We recommend you read his story, entitled
"Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix
From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable"
first, to see how Kirk remembers how we got here.
Sadly, since it showed up in book form originally, this text has
probably not been read by enough people.

The USL(AT&T) vs BSDI/UCB court case settlement documents were
not public until recently; their disclosure has made the facts more clear.
But the story of how three people decided to free the BSD codebase
of corporate pollution -- and release it freely -- is more interesting
than the lawsuit which followed. Sure, a stupid lawsuit happened which
hindered the acceptance of the BSD code during a critical period.
But how did a bunch of guys go through the effort of replacing so
much AT&T code in the first place? After all, companies had
lots of really evil lawyers back then too -- were they not afraid?

After a decade of development, most of the AT&T code had
already been replaced by university researchers and their associates.
So Keith Bostic, Mike Karels and Kirk McKusick (the main UCB CSRG group)
started going through the 4.3BSD codebase to cleanse the rest.
Keith, in particular, built a ragtag team (in those days, USENIX
conferences were a gold mine for such team building) and led these
rebels to rewrite and replace all the Imperial AT&T code, piece by
piece, starting with the libraries and userland programs.
Anyone who helped only got credit as a Contributor -- people like
Chris Torek and a cast of .. hundreds more.

Then Mike and Kirk purified the kernel. After a bit more careful
checking, this led to the release of a clean tree called Net/2 which
was given to the world in June 1991 -- the largest dump of free source
code the world had ever received (for those days -- not modern monsters like OpenOffice).

Some of these ragtags formed a company (BSDi) to sell a production system
based on this free code base, and a year later Unix System Laboratories
(basically AT&T) sued BSDi and UCB.
Eventually AT&T lost and after a few trifling fixes (described in the
lawsuit documents) the codebase was free. A few newer developments
(and more free code) were added, and released in June 1994 as 4.4BSD-Lite.
Just over 14 years later OpenBSD is releasing its own 4.4 release (and for
a lot less than $1000 per copy).

The OpenBSD 4.4 release is dedicated to Keith Bostic, Mike Karels, Kirk McKusick,
and all of those who contributed to making Net/2 and 4.4BSD-Lite free.

Source Wars
Episode IV
Trial of the BSD Knights

Not so very long ago
and not so far away
AT&T made system code
and gave some bits away

Some Berkeley geeks rebuilt it
better, faster, more diverse
This open thing was wonderful
for everyone on Earth

And then the roaring 90's came
The Empire changed its mind
And good old greed was back again
The geeks were in a legal bind

The Empire's Unix Lab
sued BSDi from above
The code is free but
only we can sell it bub!

The University came calling
in full protective mode
and proved the source in Net/2
didn't use the Empire's code

Then Bostic brought the Empire's books
n' slammed them dandys down
And showed the giant chunks
of BSD code all around

They didn't even give an ounce
of credit front to back
This broke the license USL
was using to attack

The case was thrown out by the judge
and "settled" out of court
And UCB was big enough
to take it like a sport

And to this day the geekfolk say
Now did we win or lose?
They shoulda made 'em reprint
every book with proper dues

And take out ads in major rags
apologetically
And maybe now it wouldn't be
the same monopoly

The Empire might have tumbled
down if everybody saw
How greed became so big
they couldn't see that glaring flaw

But only one community
the one that makes it tick
Is there to fight for everyone
exposing hypocrites

And OpenBSD is here
to tell the story right
Once again the fight is fought
and kept in shining light

And may the source be with you
May the Empire fall apart
Ya like that's gonna happen!
But we gotta keep heart!

We are just plain tired of being lectured to by a man
who is a lot like
Naomi Campbell.

In 1998 when a United Airlines plane was waiting in the queue at
Washington Dulles International Airport for take-off to New Orleans
(where a Usenix conference was taking place), one man stood up from
his seat, demanded that they stop waiting in the queue and be permitted
to deplane. Even after orders from the crew and a pilot from
the cockpit he refused to sit down. The plane exited the queue
and returned to the airport gangway. Security personnel ran onto
the plane and removed this man, Richard Stallman, from the plane.
After Richard was removed from the plane, everyone else stayed
onboard and continued their journey to New Orleans. A few
OpenBSD developers were on that same plane, seated very closeby,
so we have an accurate story of the events.

This is the man who presumes that he should preach to us
about morality, freedom, and what is best for us. He believes
it is his God-given role to tell us what is best for us, when he
has shown that he takes actions which are not best for everyone.
He prefers actions which he thinks are best for him -- and him
alone -- and then lies to the public. Richard Stallman is no Spock.

We release our software in ways that are maximally free. We
remove all restrictions on use and distribution, but leave a
requirement to be known as the authors. We follow a pattern of
free source code distribution that started in the mid-1980's
in Berkeley, from before Richard Stallman had any powerful
influence which he could use so falsely.

We have a development sub-tree called "ports". Our "ports" tree
builds software that is 'found on the net' into packages that
OpenBSD users can use more easily. A scaffold of Makefiles and
scripts automatically fetch these pieces of software, apply
patches as required by OpenBSD, and then build them into nice
neat little tarballs. This is provided as a convenience for
users. The ports tree is maintained by OpenBSD entirely separately
from our main source tree. Some of the software which is fetched
and compiled is not as free as we would like, but what can we do.
All the other operating system projects make exactly the same
decision, and provide these same conveniences to their users.

Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free.
He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet
he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of
them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it.
Meanwhile, Richard has personally made sure that all the official
GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows.

That man is a false leader. He is a hypocrite. There may be some
people who listen to him. But we don't listen to people who do not
follow their own stupid rules.

Puffy and the mighty Cryptonauts
Trading with new lands by open C
Corporate monsters, many closing passages
Tempting harpies
13 years of treachery

Journey's over, welcome home the heroes
Offering the bounty of their trade
Useful clothing spun from the golden fleece
For the people, free and very strongly made

But something's wrong with them
They will not take our free wares
"What's the matter good people?
Why are you so scared?
Why?"

Then one brave soul spoke out
"We're not allowed to take your gifts
Hypocrites has spoken
There are many new laws"

Hypocrites appears
"Puffy!
You must obey my new rules!"

"First rule one dictates
You cannot give your code away"

(In Greek) To your health, Nick, great bouzouki player and cool dude.

"And rule two dictates
You must give it to me
So I can give it away properly for free"

"The list goes on of course
But for traders this is all you need"

"This is madness!
He has lost his mind!
This defies the first law of free trade
Rule zero came before this rule one
Freedom means you cannot dictate to anyone"

Those of us who work on OpenBSD are often asked why we do what we do.
This song's lyrics express the core motivations and goals which have
remained unchanged over the years - secure, free, reliable software,
that can be shared with anyone. Many other projects purport to share
these same goals, and love to wrap themselves in a banner of "Open
Source" and "Free Software". Given how many projects there are one
would think it might be easy to stick to those goals, but it doesn't
seem to work out that way. A variety of desires drag many projects
away from the ideals very quickly.

Much of any operating system's usability depends on device support,
and there are some very tempting alternative ways to support devices
available to those who will surrender their moral code. A project
could compromise by entering into NDA agreements with vendors, or
including binary objects in the operating system for which no source
code exists, or tying their users down with contract terms hidden
inside copyright notices. All of these choices surrender some subset
of the ideals, and we simply will not do this. Sure, we care about
getting devices working, but not at the expense of our original goals.

Of course since "free to share with anyone" is part of our goals,
we've been at the forefront of many licensing and NDA issues,
resulting in a good number of successes. This success had led to much
recognition for the advancement of Free Software causes, but has also
led to other issues.

We fully admit that some BSD licensed software has been taken and used
by many commercial entities, but contributions come back more often
than people seem to know, and when they do, they're always still
properly attributed to the original authors, and given back in the
same spirit that they were given in the first place.

That's the best we can expect from companies. After all, we make our
stuff so free so that everyone can benefit -- it remains a core goal;
we really have not strayed at all in 10 years. But we can expect more
from projects who talk about sharing -- such as the various Linux
projects.

Now rather than seeing us as friends who can cooperatively improve all
codebases, we are seen as foes who oppose the GPL. The participants
of "the race" are being manipulated by the FSF and their legal arm, the
SFLC, for the FSF's aims, rather than the goal of getting good source
into Linux (and all other code bases). We don't want this to come off
as some conspiracy theory, but we simply urge those developers caution
-- they should ensure that the path they are being shown by those who
have positioned themselves as leaders is still true. Run for yourself,
not for their agenda.

The Race is there to be run, for ourselves, not for others. We do
what we do to run our own race, and finish it the best we can. We
don't rush off at every distraction, or worry how this will affect our
image. We are here to have fun doing right.

The starting line is nervous
we burst upon the course
Electric is our passion
An open hearted force

The water's full of dangers
That interrupt the flow
And soon the spirit splinters
as temptation takes its toll

*Give and get back some
Sharing it all
Path we know best
we're having a ball
Opulent mission
Lost in our passion
You can still choose
If you don't swim to win
you'll never lose*

One Zero Zero Zero Zero One

The window is a wall by now
A sieve of sickened holes
The water chicken stealing maps
Mistaking us for foes

The sun a son of Icarus
Flies too close to itself
Forbidden fruit is blinded
by the toys upon the shelf

*CHORUS*

One Zero One Zero One Zero One

Slow and steady wins they say
but this is not a race
It's not about who takes a prize
for first or second place

Imaginary rings of brass
Were traded for real goals
The vision and the mission lost
For those with corporate souls

*Give and get back some
Sharing it all
Path we know best
we're having a ball
Give and get zeros
Give and get ones
Given to you but
Not you to us
Opulent mission
Lost in our passion
You can still choose
If you don't swim to win
you'll never lose
You'll never lose*

Music written and arranged by Jonathan Lewis. Recorded, mixed and
mastered by Jonathan Lewis of
Moxam Studios (moxamstudios@hotmail.com).
Vocals by Duncan McDonnald (www.thegreatgavalan.com). Drums by
John McNeil. Guitar by Jeff Drummond. Bass and keyboards by
Jonathan Lewis. Lyrics by Ty Semaka and Theo de Raadt.

As developers of a free operating system, one of our prime responsibilities
is device support. No matter how nice an operating system is, it remains
useless and unusable without solid support for a wide percentage of the
hardware that is available on the market. It is therefore rather unsurprising
that more than half of our efforts focus on various aspects relating to
device support.

Most parts of the operating system (from low kernel, through to libraries,
all the way up to X, and then even to applications) use fairly obvious
interface layers, where the "communication protocols" or "argument passing"
mechanisms (ie. APIs) can be understood by any developer who takes the
time to read the free code. Device drivers pose an additional and significant
challenge though: because many vendors refuse to document the exact behavior
of their devices. The devices are black boxes. And often they are surprisingly
weird, or even buggy.

When vendor documentation does not exist, the development process can
become extremely hairy. Groups of developers have found themselves focused
for months at a time, figuring out the most simple steps, simply because
the hardware is a complete mystery. Access to documentation can ease
these difficulties rapidly. However, getting access to the chip documentation
from vendors is ... almost always a negotiation. If we had open access to
documentation, anyone would be able to see how simple all these devices
actually are, and device driver development would flourish (and not just in
OpenBSD, either).

When we proceed into negotiations with vendors, asking for documentation,
our position is often weak. One would assume that the modern market is fair,
and that selling chips would be the primary focus of these vendors. But
unfortunately a number of behemoth software vendors have spent the last 10 or
20 years building
political hurdles against the smaller players.

A particularly nasty player in this regard has been the Linux vendors and
some Linux developers, who have played along with an American corporate model
of requiring NDAs for chip documentation. This has effectively put Linux
into the club with Microsoft, but has left all the other operating system
communities -- and their developers -- with much less available clout for
requesting documentation. In a more fair world, the Linux vendors would
work with us, and the device driver support in all free operating systems
would be fantastic by now.

Puffy Baba and the 40 Vendors
We all know the details
Magic cave, magic words, some thieves,
some serious loot,
and lucky - Mister - Baba
Who got a bad rap if you ask me
The little guy who
did the best with what he had

Here are Mr. Baba's lessons
Load one ass, take a few trips and spend
in moderation
Three things the average man can't - get - right

If you know your brother is a greedy bastard
never give him the password
If he goes penguin on you,
stop - being - his brother.
When a cave is guarded by magic lawyers
A sea of blood will be its doormat
So do the best with what you have

Beyond the lessons - you must know this
that the Devil is as real as your address
But unlike Vendors,
he at least keeps the door open

Vendors of water that should be free
Look upon their words and despair
Their badvertising made a thief of my brother
then made him better off dead
Now he hasn't got shit to do his best with

Gratis. Free. Libre. Cuffo.
The companies of thieves stole every good adjective
and left us with open source (sores)
sharing smaller and smaller bandages
for each consecutive cut
But with the salty water of labour
parched desert becomes pregnant black soil

It's not whether you're well off
it's where you dig the well
The best the little guy can do is what
the little guy does right

"OpenVOX"

This is an extra track by the artist Ty Semaka
(who really has "had Puffy on his mind") which we included on the "The Songs 3.0 - 4.0" audio CD.

This song details the process that Ty has to go through to make the art
and music for each OpenBSD release.
Ty and Theo really do go to a (very specific) bar and discuss what is
going on in the project, and then try to find a theme that will work...

The 1st OpenBSD Audio CD "The Songs 3.0 - 4.0" celebrates the artwork
and songs that have been released with each OpenBSD release. All the
songs from the 3.0 to 4.0 releases are included (plus this bonus track).

Includes an 11cm silver-on-clear die-cut wireframe Puffy sticker!

Be Open
Be Vocal
Stay Open
Stay Vocal

(repeat)

OpenBSD

Twice a year,
me an' Theo Theorize over beer
at the Ship and outhip all the misers
and take strips out of liars.
He sits me down and he tries to explain:
He says "The badabadabingabanger
button on the raidorama cuttin'
on the systematicalifornication
and a license application
is a fishybomination
and a random allocation
got a copywritten melanoma
sasafrazzin' wireless device".
OK stop.
I get it.
Some asshole lied.

And then he says,
"The crashorama villaination
lawyerific pornication threatifies
the only honest hackerammerunderider
in the cyber cider documation
universal anagrama-attic (I'm outta here)
cohabitationizizingation"
OK stop.
I get it.
Some asshole said he was "open"
but he was only open for business.
I get it.
Where's my pencils?
Bring me my mic!

Be Open
Be Vocal
Stay Open
Stay Vocal

(repeat)

Then he has another beer and
gets all, you know, pushy.
Make Puffy kill pussies?
And too much thinkin' and kitchen sinkin'
the drawings or toons I should say,
where a fish can talk, be an agent
a hit man or walk, and ride horses
and forces my hand to make Puffy a spy
or a cowboy, or WHY a little girl, in a dream
and fake Floyd as the theme?
And squeeze in five concepts
every time, every song!
And the geeks and Theo lose it
if I draw the device wrong!
"It's four little buttons not five Ty"
And pretty soon I'll be losing my mind
cause it's a f@#!kin' cartoon!

The last 10 years, every 6 month period has (without fail)
resulted in an official OpenBSD release making it to the FTP
servers. But CDs are also manufactured, which the project
sells to continue our development goals.

While tests of the release binaries are done by developers
around the world, Theo and some developers from Calgary
or Edmonton (such as Peter Valchev or Bob Beck) test that
the discs are full of (only) correct code. Ty Semaka works for
approximately two months to design and draw artwork that will fit
the designated theme, and coordinates with his music buddies to
write and record a song that also matches the theme.

Then the discs and all the artwork gets delivered to the plant,
so that they can be pressed in time for an official release date.

This release, instead of bemoaning vendors or organizations that
try to make our task of writing free software more difficult, we
instead celebrate the 10 years that we have been given (so far) to
write free software, express our themes in art, and the 5 years
that we have made music with a group of talented musicians.

OpenBSD developers have been torturing each other for years now
with Humppa-style music, so this release our users get a taste
of this too. Sometimes at hackathons you will hear the same
songs being played on multiple laptops, out of sync. It is
under such duress that much of our code gets written.

We feel like Pufferix and Bobilix delivering The Three Discs of
Freedom to those who want them whenever the need arises, then
returning to celebrate the (unlocked) source tree with all the
other developers.

OpenBSD emphasizes security. It also emphasizes openness. All the code
is there for all to see. Blobs are vendor-compiled binary drivers
without any source code. Hardware makers like them because they
obscure the details of how to make their hardware work. They hide bugs
and workarounds for bugs. Newer versions of blobs can weaken support
for older hardware and motivate people to buy new hardware.

Blobs are expedient. Many other open source operating systems
cheerfully incorporate them; in fact their users demand them.

But when you need to trust the system, how do you check the blob for
quality? For adherence to standards? How do you know the blob contains
no malicious code? No incompetent code? Inspection is impossible; you
can only test the black box. And when it breaks, you have no idea why.

Blobs can be 'de-supported' by vendors
at any time.

Blobs cannot be supported by developers.

Blobs cannot be fixed by developers.

Blobs cannot be improved.

Blobs cannot be audited.

Blobs are specific to an architecture, thus
less portable.

Blobs are quite often massively bloated.

This release, like every OpenBSD release, contains OpenBSD and its
source code. It runs on a wide variety of hardware. It contains many
new features and improvements. OpenBSD does attempt to convince
vendors to release documentation, and often reverse-engineers around
the need for blobs. OpenBSD remains blob-free. Anyone can look at it,
assess it, improve it. If it breaks, it can be fixed.

Little baby Blobby was a cute little baby
when we found him on the beach,
there was nothin' shady
you could bounce him on your knee
like a ba-ba-ball
and his first little word was adorable

He said a blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah
Blah!

Thin edge of the wedge?
But everybody was so happy - about Blob

Blob was popular at school he was helpful too
He could get your motor runnin'
with a drop of goo
He was givin' it away never charged a dime
But by the time he graduated
Blob was business slime!

For a multitude of (stupid) reasons, vendors often attempt to lock
out our participation with their customers by refusing to give our
programmers sufficient documentation so that we can properly support
their devices.

Take Adaptec for instance. Before the 3.7 release we disabled support
for the
aac(4)
Adaptec RAID driver because negotiations with the Adaptec had failed.
They refused to give us documentation. Without documentation, support
for their controller had always been poor. The driver had bugs (which
affected some users more than others) which caused crashes, and of
course there was no RAID management support. Apparently most of these
bugs are because the Adaptec controllers have numerous buggy firmware
issues which require careful workarounds; without documentation we
cannot solve these issues.

The driver was written by an OpenBSD developer, who cribbed parts
of it from a FreeBSD driver written by an ex-Adaptec employee. But no
public documentation exists, and Adaptec has dozens of cards with
different firmware issues. All of this adds up to a very desperate
development model -- it becomes very hard for the principle of
"quality" to show its head.

RAID devices have two main qualities that people buy them for:

Redundancy

Repair

You want a RAID unit to provide you with redundancy, so that if some drives
fail, your data is not lost. But once a drive has failed, you require your
array to (automatically, most likely) perform the operations to repair
itself, so that it is functioning perfectly again.

Some vendors (or like the above Adaptec case, ex-employee) have
sometimes given us some documentation so that we could write drivers,
so that their devices could support Redundancy. But these vendors have
never given us any documentation for performing Repairs.

Instead these vendors have tried to pass out non-free RAID management
tools. These are typically gigantic Linux binaries, or some crazy thing, that
is supposed to work through a bizarre interface in the device driver, which
we are apparently supposed to write code for without any documentation.

And since we refuse to accept our users being forced into depending on
vendor binaries, we have reverse engineered the management interface for
the AMI controllers.

There is no great "intellectual property" in this stuff, it is all
rather simple primitives. This is all that we need to implement
basic RAID management:

SCSI transactions on the back-side busses

Discovering which drives are in which volumes

Being able to silence the buzzer

Marking a new drive as a Hot-Spare

The AMI driver needed to support these small primitive operations.
And once we had that, we rely on something else which we know: Almost
all the RAID controllers would need the same primitives.

Thus armed, we were able to write a generic framework which would later
work on other vendors' RAID cards, that is, once we get documentation
or do some reverse engineering for their products.

But having been ignored for so long by these vendors, it is not clear when (if
ever) we will get around to writing that support for Adaptec RAID
controllers now. And Adaptec has gone and bought ICP Vortex, which
may mean we can never get documentation for the
gdt(4)
controllers.
The "Open Source Friendly liar" IBM owns Mylex, and Mylex has told us we
would not get documentation, either.
3Ware has lied to us and our users so many times they make politicians
look saintly.

Until other vendors give us documentation, if you want reliable RAID
in OpenBSD, please buy
LSI/AMI
RAID cards. And everything
will just work.

And keep pestering the other vendors.

Narrator:
Welcome friends to the adventures of Puffiana Jones!

Brought to you by the good people at OpenBSD!

Whether braving jungles of wires, oceans of code, or hacking the most
treacherous of crypts, one fish fights for justice. With bravery and
morality like none other, one name rings true. Puffiana Jones, famed
hackologist and adventurer!

Tracking down valuable artifacts and returning them to the public from
the steely grip of greed. Many a villain has he pummeled, many a vile
vendor has he thwarted, countless thugs, lawyers and kitties abound.

Join us now in his latest adventure. Hackers of the Lost RAID!

Marlus:
Puffy, this mission will be dangerous.

Puffy:
I'm a careful guy Marlus.

Puffy and Salmah:
They're hacking in the wrong place!

Beluge:
You will never get the documentation Jones! Ah ha ha ha ha!

Puffy:
Now you're gettin' nasty.

Puffy:
SCSI's, why'd it have to be SCSI's?

Salmah:
API's, very dangerous. You go first.

Narrator:
Through thick and thin our hero persists, until finally,
there before him
lies the answer of the ages. How to get OpenBSD, the world's most
secure operating system,
to communicate with the lost RAID. But alas, he is foiled once again by
the evil Neozis. Again he must chase the truth. Will our hero prevail?

Triumphant again! Join us next time for the continuing adventures of
Puffiana Jones!

Music composed by Ty Semaka and Jonathan Lewis.
The Moxam Orchestra programmed and played by Jonathan Lewis.
Vocals and Lyrics by Ty Semaka. Drums by Charlie Bullough.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Jonathan Lewis of
Moxam Studios (moxamstudios@hotmail.com).

For an operating system to get anywhere in "the market" it must have
good device support.

Ethernet was our first concern. Many vendors refused to supply
programmers with programming documentation for these chipsets. Donald
Becker (Linux) and Bill Paul (FreeBSD) changed the rules of the game
here: They wrote drivers for the chipsets that they could get
documentation for, and as they succeeded in writing more and more
drivers, eventually closed vendors slowly opened up until most
ethernet chipset documentation was available. Today, some vendors
still resist releasing ethernet chipset documentation (ie. Broadcom,
Intel, Marvell/SysKonnect, NVIDIA) but the driver problem is mostly
solved in the ethernet market.

Similar problems have happened in the SCSI, IDE, and RAID markets.
Again, the problem was solved by writing drivers for documented
devices first. If the free software user communities use those drivers
preferentially, it is a market loss for the secretive vendors.
Another approach that has worked is to publish email addresses and
phone numbers for the marketing department managers in these
companies. These email campaigns have worked almost every time.

The new frontier: 802.11 wireless chipsets.

Over the last six months, this came to a head in the OpenBSD project.
We asked our users to help us petition numerous vendors so that we
could get chipset documentation or redistributable firmware. Certainly, we did
not succeed for some vendors. But we did influence some vendors, in
particular the Taiwanese (Ralink and Realtek), who have given us
everything we need. We also reverse engineered the Atheros chipsets.

Send a message that open support for hardware matters. A vendor in
Redmond largely continues their practices because they get
the chipset documentation years before everyone else does.
What really upsets us the most is that some Linux vendors are signing
Non-Disclosure Agreements with vendors, or contracts that let them
distribute firmwares. Meanwhile both Linux and FSF head developers
are not asking their communities to help us in our efforts to free
development information for all, but are even going further and
telling their development communities to not work with us at
pressuring vendors. It is ridiculous.

The heroine is deaf to her device
her uncles on the farm,
send out the alarm
and the shit storm flies
E-maelstrom is lifting up the house
With Puffathy inside,
twisting up a ride
to the land of OS
Hard landing, the packets celebrate
The wicked lawyers dead
The open slippers red are
Hers to take

Ding dong the lawyer's dead
You're off to see the Wizard kid

The north witch instructed Puffathy
To get yourself back home
Take this yellow road and
You'll be fine
Believe in the open ruby shoes
Now go to see the Wiz and
give Taiwan your biz
You'll never lose
The 3 friends she made along the way
Were nice but pretty lame,
lazy and insane
but they sang OK

Ding dong the lawyer's dead
You're off to see the Wizard kid

Finally we're through the trees
The city glows
It's positively green
Pompously the wizard booms
He wants the broom of triple 'w'

Go to the west
You must pass the test
For me
Bring me the ride
of the witch I despise
And you'll be free

You don't need the broom
You don't need the shoes
You don't need the wiz
You will never lose
You have all you need
You always had heart
You always had courage
Did somebody fart?
You always had brains
You answered each call
And this may surprise you
But you've got some balls
So double click heels
and work with Taiwan
And speak to your doggie
You're already gone....

What is up with some free software providers?!
They say "Here's something free! Oh wait, I changed my mind."

While not exactly bait-and-switch, this is something which
has been causing the community continual grief, and therefore
we decided to honour a few of the projects that have decided
to go non-free. After all.. having gone non-free, no one is
going to remember them in the end.

This song is dedicated to a few worthy groups who
have made this Free-to-Non-Free transition with their
offerings in the last few years:

David Dawes worked for years with a team of
developers to make a free X11 distribution for us to use,
called XFree86, 98% of which was based on entirely free
code from MIT. Suddenly, one day, he decided that
we must give him more credit (ie. advertise his name) or
stop using it. Within about 4 months every project had
told him to get stuffed, and the community has created a
replacement effort.
Now his team cannot even keep their web pages up to date...

OpenBSD was the first operating system to integrate a
packet filter, and it was the ipf codebase from Darren Reed
that we chose. But a few years later he told us that we
were not free to make changes to the code. So we deleted ipf,
and our new packet filter far exceeds the capabilities of the
one he wrote. And other projects are switching too...

The Apache group started from the humble beginnings
of just being 'a patchy' set of changes to a completely free
web server of dubious quality. But the years have changed them,
and what they supply is now quite non-free... released under
a license so entangled in legalese that we have absolutely no
doubt that there are encumbrances hidden within. Legal terms
protect. Who are they protecting? Not your freedom.

So here's a goodbye to those three groups, and a warning to any
others who will follow them:
Make your stuff non-free, and something else will
replace it.

Well he rode from the ocean far upstream
Nuthin' to his name but a code and a dream
Lookin' for the legendary inland sea
Where the water was deep n' clean n' free

But the town he found had suffered a blow
Fish were dying, cause the water was low
Fat cat fish name o' Diamond Dawes
Plugged the stream with copyright laws

He said my water's good n' my water's free
So Pond-erosa, you gonna thank me!
Then he bottled it up and he labeled it "Mine"
They opened n' poured, but they ran outta time!

So Puff made a brand and he tanned his hide
Said. "this is the mark of too much pride"
Tied him to a horse, set the tail on fire
Slapped er on the ass and the water went higher!

Pond-erosa Puff
wouldn't take no guff
Water oughta be clean and free
So he fought the fight
and he set things right
With his OpenBSD

Well things were good fer a spell in town
But then one day, dang water turned brown
Comin' to the rescue, Mayor Reed
He said, "This here filter's all ya'll need"

But it didn't take long 'fore the filter plugged
Full of mud, n' crud, n' bugs
Folks said "gotta be a gooder way"
Mayor said "Hell No! She's O.K."

"The water's fine on the Open range"
And he passed a law that it couldn't change.
"No freeze, no boil, no frolicking young"
Puff took him aside, said "this is wrong"

Then he found the Mayor was addin' the crud!
So he took him down in a cloud of blood
Said "The Mayor's learnd, he's done been mean"
So they did it right and the water went clean!

CHORUS

So once agin' it was right, but then
The lake went dry, she was gone again!
Fish started flippin' and floppin' about
Yellin' "Mercy Puff! It's a doggone drought!"

So he rolled up-gulch till he hit the lake
Of Apache fish, they was on the take
They'd built a dam that was made of rules
Now Puff was pissed and he lost his cool!

I'm sick and tired of these goldarn words!
n' laws n' bureaucratic nerds!
You're full o' beans n' killin' my town
and if you's all don't shut er down

I'll hang a lickin' on every one
of you sons o' bitchin' greedy scum!
So he blew the dam, an' he let 'er haul
Cause water oughta be free for all!

CHORUS

That's right!
I'll hang a lickin' on ya!
Never piss on another man's boot!

A common theme used by the comedy crew Monty Python was to emphasize
and exaggerate ridiculousnesses that their target had imposed upon
themselves. Few things could be considered as humorous as making a
redundancy protocol... redundant; e.g. being forced to replace it by
Cisco lawyers and IETF policy.

We've been working a few years now on our packet filtering software
pf(4)
and it became time to add failover. We want to be able to set up pf
firewalls side by side, and exchange the stateful information between
them, so that in case of failure another could take over 'keep state'
sessions. Our
pfsync(4)
protocol solves this problem. However, on both sides of the firewall,
it is also necessary to have all the regular hosts not see a
network failure. The only reliable way to do this is for both
firewall machines to have and use the same IP and MAC addresses. But
the only real way to do that is to use multicast protocols.

The IETF community proposed work in this direction in the late
90's, however in 1997 Cisco informed them that they believed some of
Cisco's patents covered the proposed IETF VRRP (Virtual Router
Redundancy Protocol); on
March 20, 1998 they went further and specifically named their HSRP
"Hot Standby Router Protocol" patent. Reputedly, they were upset
that IETF had not simply adopted the flawed HSRP protocol as the
standard solution for this problem. Despite this legal pressure, the
IETF community forged ahead and published VRRP as a standard even
though there was a patent in the space. Why?
There was much deliberation
at all levels of the IETF, and unfortunately for all of us the
politicians within eventually decided to allow patented technology in
standards -- as long as the patented technology is licensed under RAND
(Reasonable And Non Discriminatory) terms. As free software
programmers, we therefore find ourselves in the position that these
RAND standards must not be implemented by us, and we must deviate from
the standard. We find all this rather Unreasonable and Discriminatory
and we *will* design competing protocols. Some standards organization,
eh?

Due to some HSRP flaws fixed by VRRP and for compatibility with the
(HSRP-licensed) VRRP implementations of their competitors, Cisco in
recent times has largely abandoned HSRP and now relies on VRRP instead
-- a protocol designed for and by the community, but for which they
claim patent rights.

On August 7 2002, after many communications, Robert Barr (Cisco's
lawyer) firmly informed the OpenBSD community that Cisco would defend
its patents for VRRP implementations -- meaning basically that it was
impossible for a free software group to produce a truly free
implementation of the IETF standard protocol. Perhaps this is because
Cisco and Alcatel are currently engaged in a pair of patent lawsuits; a
small piece of which is Cisco attempting to use the HSRP patent
against Alcatel for their use of VRRP. Some IETF working group
members took note of our complaints,
however an attempt in April 2003 to have the IETF abandon the use of
patented technology failed to "reach consensus" in the IETF.

A few years ago, the W3C, who designs our web protocols, tried to move
to a RAND policy as well (primarily because of pressure from Microsoft
and Apple), but the community outrage was so overpowering that they
backed down. Some standards groups use this policy, while others
avoid it -- the one differentiation being the amount of corporate
participation. In the IETF, the pro-RAND agents work for AT&T,
Alcatel, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and other large companies. Since IETF
is an open forum, they can blend in as the populace, and vote just
like all others, except against the community.

Translation: In failing to "reach consensus", the companies who
benefit from RAND won, and the community lost again.

Left with little choice, we proceeded to reinvent the wheel or, more
correctly, abandon the wheel entirely and go for a "hovercraft". We
designed CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) to solve the same
problem that these other protocols are designed for, but without the
same technological basis as HSRP and VRRP. We read the patent
document carefully and ensured that CARP was fundamentally different.
We also avoided many of the flaws in HSRP and VRRP (such as an inherent
lack of security). And since we are OpenBSD developers, we designed
it to use cryptography.

The combination of
pf(4),
pfsync(4), and
carp(4)
has permitted us to build highly redundant firewalls. To date, we
have built a few networks that include as many as 4 firewalls, all
running random reboot cycles. As long as one firewall is alive in a
group, traffic through them moves smoothly and correctly for all of
our packet filter functionality. Cisco's low end products are unable
to do this reliably, and if they have high end products which can do
this, you most certainly cannot afford them.

As a final note of course, when we petitioned IANA, the IETF body
regulating "official" internet protocol numbers, to give us numbers
for CARP and pfsync our request was denied. Apparently we had failed
to go through an official standards organization. Consequently we
were forced to choose a protocol number which would not conflict with
anything else of value, and decided to place CARP at IP protocol 112.
We also placed pfsync at an open and unused number. We informed IANA of
these decisions, but they declined to reply.

This ridiculous situation then inspired one of our developers to create
this parody of the well-known Monty Python skit and song.

Customer:
Hello, I would like to buy a CARP license please.
Licenser:
A what?
Customer:
A license for my network redundancy protocol, CARP.
Licenser:
Well, it's free isn't it?
Customer:
Exactly, the protocol's name is CARP. CARP the redundancy protocol.
Licenser:
What?
Customer:
He is an.... redundancy protocol.
Licenser:
CARP is a free redundancy protocol!
Customer:
Yes, I chose it out of three, I didn't like the others,
they were all too... encumbered. And now I must license it!
Licenser:
You must be a looney.
Customer:
I am not a looney! Why should I be tied with the epithet looney merely
because I wish to protect my redundancy protocol? I've heard tell
that Network Associates has a pet algorithm called RSA used in IETF
standards, and you wouldn't call them a looney; Geoworks has a claim
on WAP, after what their lawyers do to you if you try to implement it.
Cisco has two redundant patents, both encumbered, and Cadtrack has a
patent on cursor movement! So, if you're calling the large American
companies that fork out millions of dollars for the use of XOR a
bunch of looneys, I shall have to ask you to step outside!
Licenser:
Alright, alright, alright. A license.
Customer:
Yes.
Licenser:
For a free redundancy protocol?
Customer:
Yes.
Licenser:
You are a looney.
Customer:
Look, it allows for bleeding redundancy doesn't it? Cisco's got a
patent for the HSRP, and I've got to get a license for me router
VRRP.
Licenser:
You don't need a license for your VRRP.
Customer:
I bleeding well do and I got one. It can't be called VRRP without it.
Licenser:
There's no such thing as a bloody VRRP license.
Customer:
Yes there is!
Licenser:
Isn't!
Customer:
Is!
Licenser:
Isn't!
Customer:
I bleeding got one, look! What's that then?
Licenser:
This is a Cisco HSRP patent document with the word "Cisco" crossed
out and the word "IETF" written in in crayon.
Customer:
The man didn't have the right form.
Licenser:
What man?
Customer:
Robert Barr, the man from the redundancy detector van.
Licenser:
The looney detector van, you mean.
Customer:
Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
Licenser:
What redundancy detector van?
Customer:
The redundancy detector van from the Monopoly of Cizzz-coeee.
Licenser:
Cizzz-coeee?
Customer:
It was spelt like that on the van. I'm very observant! I never seen
so many bleeding aerials. The man said that their equipment could
pinpoint a failover configuration at 400 yards! And my Cisco router,
being such a flappy bat, was a piece of cake.
Licenser:
How much did you pay for that?
Customer:
Sixty quid, and twenty grand for the PIX.
Licenser:
What PIX?
Customer:
The PIX I'm replacing!
Licenser:
So you're replacing your PIX with free software, and yet you want to
license it?
Customer:
There's nothing so odd about that. I'm sure they patented this
protocol too. After all, the IETF had a hand in it!
Licenser:
No they didn't!
Customer:
Did!
Licenser:
Didn't!
Customer:
Did, did, did and did!
Licenser:
Oh, all right.
Customer:
Spoken like a gentleman, sir. Now, are you going to give me a CARP
license?
Licenser:
I promise you that there is no such thing. You don't need one.
Customer:
In that case, give me a Firewall License.
Licenser:
A license?
Customer:
Yes.
Licenser:
For your firewall?
Customer:
No.
Licenser:
No?
Customer:
No, half my firewall. It had an accident.
Licenser:
You're off your chump.
Customer:
Look, if you intend by that utilization of an obscure colloquialism
to imply that my sanity is not entirely up to scratch, or indeed to deny the
semi-existence of my little half firewall, I shall have to ask you to
listen to this! Take it away CARP the orchestra leader!

A zero... one.. A one zero one one

VRRP, philosophically,
must ipso facto standard be
But standard it
needs to be free
vis a vis
the IETF
you see?

But can VRRP
be said to be
or not to be
a standard, see,
when VRRP can not be free,
due to some Cisco patentry..

Singing...

La Dee Dee, 1, 2, 3.
VRRP ain't free.
O P E N B S D
CARP is free

Is this wretched Cisco-eze
let through IETF to mean
my firewall must pay legal fees?
No! CARP and PF are Free!

Join Puffy Hood and his Funny Fish as they take on
the Sheriff (an unelected leader) and other evil
forces of the draconian government!

As we did for the 3.3 release, we have once again tried
making release artwork and music which are allegorical
of recent happenings.

Two years ago we became involved with the University
of Pennsylvania and DARPA, who were funding us to do
security research and development .. on things that
we were already intending to do. We provided ideas,
wrote papers, and deployed cutting-edge technology;
DARPA provided finances and reaped a share of the
credit, and the University of Pennsylvania acted as
a middle-man. We accepted funding based on the
promise that our freedom to operate as we wished
was unaffected. To us, freedom is more important
than funding -- heck, we were dealing with the evil
forces of government, and needed to be careful.

A few months prior to this release, DARPA suddenly
and without warning decided to withdraw that funding;
they also aggressively backed out of contractual
obligations. Many articles in the press followed regarding
this sudden maneuver. Apparently this hoopla happened
because an OpenBSD-related article in the Canadian
newspaper The Globe & Mail had quoted Theo de Raadt
making anti-war statements regarding Iraq and the
theft of oil.

The only answer given (to major media reporters) by a
DARPA spokesperson (Jan Walker) was this:

"As a result of the DARPA review of the
project, and due to world events and the evolving
threat posed by increasingly capable nation-states,
the Government on April 21 advised the University
to suspend work on the "security fest" portion of
the project."

That almost toes the line of calling us terrorists!
We had lost financial support, but the release of the
statement above suddenly made us very happy to be free
of any perceived obligation to such crazy people.

Since the termination came near natural contract
termination (about 4 months remained), less damage
than expected was sustained by the project. Sponsors
stepped forward and helped us make up the missing funds
we needed to run our "Hackathon", and the event
proceeded as planned. We even had T-shirts made with
"Workstations of Mass Development" artwork for those
developers who attended (sorry, they are not for sale).

We could not make stories like this up. So instead,
we are making up an allegory about it, using the tale
of Robin Hood.

Sir Puffy of Ramsay was a wandrin'
Through forests of seaweed all alone
He had found the crusades
were an endless charade
So for now he called Nothing Hack home

One day he met Little Bob of Beckley
Beat him fair on a log-in by staff
Clever chums they did find
other fish of their kind
Thwarting evil with humppa and math

Now trouble was a brewin' when the Good King was away
The Sheriff came a callin' for the poor to pay
With CD's and their freedom
for to share online
And burning down the village cause he was a slime

So Puffy and his buddies took the booty from the rich
and turned it into a system to protect poor fish
Sent out by Hook or a Wim
to the teaming schools
Town cryers were on fire cause the crypto ruled!

Chorus:
They called it "BSD"!
And "Open" because it's always free
So raise up your glass and
three cheers to the Funny
Fish for never running
and making something good!
And here's to Puffy Hood!

Aaaw! Word to the sea y'all
The Hood's a bad ball
Ya underneath he's a heathen and a traitor
He can take from you all and say "later!"
Think he's a hero?
Naw he ain't lovin' ya
He gettin' richer than Bill Gates and Dubya
Read the Wanted poster
of Sheriff Plac-o-derm fool
We gettin' back the booty
or we take away your worms too

Yo! Word to the classes
Put on your glasses
I guess the Sheriff is King till this passes
Times are a changin' and movin' so fast
He says "Give me your freedom,
I'll grasp it and pass it to brass
who can hash it for weapons of massive distraction.
And hand me the bastards that brashly amassed from the cash
happy faction of oily and gassy co-action".
No! Don't hand em dick, grab a stick, keep attacking for freedom
and hack till the King cometh back and leave em'

Then trouble was a rollin' with an army on the run
The Sheriff came a callin' for the spikey one
And took back all the booty
Puff intended for the poor
The Arch-a-thon went on despite the mighty roar

Puff snuck into the castle, and found the treasure hill
And also found Maid Marlin held against her will
He loaded all the loot
to give it back and big surprise
He took the maiden too, 'cause she was easy on the eyes

Chorus:
They called it "BSD"!
And "Open" because it's always free
So raise up your glass and
three cheers to the Funny
Fish for never running
and making something good!
And here's to Puffy Hood!

Like other Barbarians before him, Puff has had to
face some pretty crazy challenges.
This song is an allegory of the recent difficulties
we went through dealing with Sun, who refused our
request for documentation about their UltraSPARC
III processors. We want documentation, because
these are the fastest processors with a per-page
eXecute bit in the MMU, needed to fully support
our new W^X security feature. In the meantime,
the AMD Hammer has come onto the scene, and
this processor supports an eXecute bit in 64-bit
mode.

And it is going to be faster...

Deep through the mists of time
Gaze to the crystal ball
Back to the age of darkness
Black was the protocol

A King ruled the web with fear
Spilling the blood of men
Then from the ocean came
Puff the Barbarian

Born in a tiny bowl Puff was a pet
Sold into slav-er-y by the man
Eating the weeds till he was strong enough
Breaking his bonds like nobody can

Down the sewer pipes of Hell
A thousand kitties then did bleed
Constraints were slain as well
Hacked his way out to the C

And there he found
His destiny
Hammer of the Ocean God
"Xor taking care of me"

Then in a dream Xor requested he
"Go to the Sun King, get what I yearn
Kernighan saw it, prophet of the C
Knowledge - so they may never return"

At the tower Puff appealed
For the wisdom of the One
Denied, his mind did reel
Puff was getting tired of Sun

Broke down the guard
Cause math is hard
Saw McNealy on his throne
All alone and only bones

Come the Sun King blade ablur
Hammer down eclipse the Sun
And Puff, the land secured
The new King Barbarian!

Written and arranged by Ty Semaka.
Co-arranged, recorded, mixed & mastered by Jonathan Lewis.
Vocals by DeVille, guitar by Sean Desmond, bass by Ian Knox,
drums by John McNiel, violin by Jonathan Lewis.